What Am I Working On?

The links feature is officially complete. It supports auto-migration from legacy attachments to new media entity usage shown above. It supports the following domains out of the box for embeds.

youtube - shorts and videos
vimeo
twitch - clips, videos, and streams
facebook - clips, videos, and streams
tiktok - videos and profiles
instagram
twitter
reddit
spotify

All of these iframes. This means no 3rd party JS tracking cookies, etc.. It also means no page delays due to 3rd party JS files.

If there's other popular social media sites that you'd like native embed support for please let me know and can look into it. There's some requirements for me to support a site natively though. Mainly they need to use modern cross-iframe message API for communicating the iframe height. Without that they will not be natively supported.

Note all standard social media metadata tags are supported out of the box. So any URL linked with open graph or twitter metadata will parse out as you'd expect them to on other social media platforms.

The new Locations feature is coming along nicely. The first API implementation is for Google Maps. Next will be OpenStreetMaps. Other map types maybe considered for future releases. Additionally you'll be able to select None for the map type and continue with the old usage of requesting their address or using the find location button.

 

They'll have a nice map to scroll through and select what place they'll be at, going to, etc.. Additionally it supports geolocating. So if they click a building that doesn't have a place it will convert the latitude and longitude to a user friendly address if possible.

Please keep in mind these services provided by Google Maps are not entirely free. Everyone gets $200 of credits per month, which covers nearly 40,000 map API requests, which should be more than enough for most sites. It however will require an API key and a billing account at Google. This is why we'll be offerings other map types as well, but this by far gives the best experience for your users so it will be up to you as to what you'd like to do. OpenStreetMaps will be a solid free alternative, but it has significantly less Place data than Google Maps so please keep that in mind.

The location feature is officially 100% complete. You'll now also be able to separately select where a location is linked to. So for example they could select their location using OpenStreetMaps, which would then create a link to Google Maps. The choice will be entirely up to you. We will default to OpenStreetMaps for both map and linking as it's free and does not require any API key or additional input from you. Google Maps will require an API key, but provides a lot better Place data so the choice is yours.

Now onto the next thing. The old message limit counter (e.g. 30 / 400) shown at the bottom right of a message container is now replaced with a meter. The meter gives the user an idea of how much they've input without it feeling so obsessive with counting characters. Take a look below.

Meter
 

Overfilled
 

Validation
 

This of course works for activity and comments replacing the old usage in both.

Well I thought the location feature was done, but showed it to my wife and immediately "How do I search for a location? Maybe I already left it, but need to tag it in my post.". So here we are. There's now a search feature. This is supported with Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps. With Google Maps it'll automatically take care of searching in a radius of where the map is looking, but for OSM you'll need to be more specific with your searching. I've also optimized it to use the bare minimum of API requests for Google Maps (and heavy caching!) to reduce the costs. You can see it in action below.

 

The filtering functionality is now being worked on to completion. Currently you can directly filter by Hashtag and Mention. Below is what this looks like in the filter menu.

Filter
 

Display
 

There will also be support for directly searching against post messages, but it's recommended not to use it since that's a pretty heavy database call, but it will be left to you to decide if you want to use that or not.

Note how Display: changes to the filtered hashtag. Also keep in mind only ONE filter can be applied at a time. So you cannot for example search a Hashtag then further filter that by Mention. Doing so would be too inefficient on the database and am trying to prioritize performance otherwise you'd run into situations where it could become uncontrollably slow.

The filter functionality is now complete. In addition to the above searching by hashtag and mentions you can also search by post message. Note all 3 are disabled by default and can be toggled on under Filters for an activity stream.

 

In addition to this filter "memory" is now implemented. So for example of you were to select Mentioned in the above screenshot and you refreshed the page it will remember you selected Mentioned and display it again automatically.